If you ever ask yourself – Why is social media, participation, group forming in different shades and colors changing the world around us? – then this book is a must read in my opinion.

As humans we want to participate in groups. We need other people, we need to reflect our own image, we need love and relationships – and we need to learn from older and wiser people in our group. We need peers to adjust our own behavior.

But just a moment ago (before the internet) it was quite difficult to form groups.

We invented organizations (corporations – political organizations – unions – NGOs) because in order to get something done – in order to bring people together – we needed structure, we needed hierarchy, we needed systems.

We also organized a lot around locality. Because forming a group with people in the other end of the country didn’t make much sense if there were no means of interacting with them group wise.

Not so anymore – all you need is a browser and a login to blogger, YouTube, facebook or whatever group-forming tool that makes you click – and you are on your way to group-forming-nirvana.

Need to find a group that already exists? Try Google – or Yahoo – or follow the group trace of millions of people on Facebook (Here in Denmark thousands of people have joined a group because a guy is organizing a garden party in one of the parks in Copenhagen!).

This easy group forming is the real revolution according to Clay Shirky. And this is why web 2.0 (or whatever name you like to give the new paradigm) will transform society more than we can even begin to imagine.

Clay Shirkys point is that just like it took us a hundred years to figure out what the society needed AFTER the printing press was invented (newspapers, school systems, libraries, bookshops, reading chairs 🙂 it will take a while before we get our heads around extremely easy group formation.

I really found the book enjoyable – and I will recommend it to anyone who needs to find out what is going on with all these social tools on the internet 🙂

UPDATE: They never got to the interesting question – what are we suppose to do about it if the internet is really ruining our culture? I got really annoyed with the moderator and the debate could IMO have been a lot better if he had been less talkative.

Here are my notes…

David Weinberger is at stage here, at Picnic07 discussing the difference between structuring information on the internet and in the real world. Why is the internet credible – and why is it not fair to think the internet is useless just because there is so much useless information there? (He is not saying exactly that – but we are all anticipating the debate between Weinberger and Andrew Keen – who is the author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy”).

Weinberger says Wikipedia gets its credibility through debate and discussions – and through the fact that Wikipedia itself says “this article appears to contradict itself” or “the neutrality of this article is disputed” – something that we never see in other places – like newspapers (why can’t an article be marked with “this article appears to be biased”?)

Andrew Keen thinks DW is messing up media and people – he thinks that because DW thinks that the web shows people he thinks we should accept that it will also show faults – and AK disagrees that we need faults – we need clarity.

AK don’t think that media should reflect the world and people – it should simplify and entertain – we don’t know what is going on other places – we need media to communicate the world to us in an understandable way – and AK thinks that the internet is to difficult and that means that we need gatekeepers to make it easier to us – the world is better with experts.

Question from moderator Walt Mossberg (The Wall Street Journal); Don’t AK believe that there are more people than the journalists who are able to communicate and tell stories?

AK answers by saying that people who are good and knowledgeable probably wouldn’t have the ressources to do as good a job as a real writer og a real journalist.

DW says that he doesn’t believe that everyone in the world is capable of doing everything (the debate is turning lame here – the moderator is talking and I don’t get a word DW is saying – sorry!)

The guy who is moderating – Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal – says that his readers want simplicity – not complexity.

DW argues that complexity is what happens when we talk together as people. And that conversations is all about unfolding more complexity. He states that if you need a new camera you go to “the long tail” of people – you don’t just read reviews from magazines and journalists – amateurs are as competent as the best journalist.

Question from WM: How do you know who they are? And what if they are paid to talk about the camera? – and to what extend can you trust the community to “out” people who are wrong?

DW tries to answer – but is again interrupted by Walt Mossberg – who is IMHO not moderating – but talking and interrupting exessively whenever DW or AK is trying to answer…

AK – talks about the entries in Wikipedia about thruthiness (a word coined by Colbert) and thruth and is sad that they are about the same lenght even though truth is very important to our culture – while thruthiness is just some funny word. AK stresses that this illustrates the problem with Wikipedia who has no context – because no one tells us if the content is important or not.

(I don’t understand how this is difficult to encyclopedias in paper? The entry on China is probably longer than the entry on thruth – and so what – if they are both usefull in the context that I am in? Unfortunately there is no time for questions afterwards so I guess will just stay puzzled? 🙂

UPDATE 27.09.2007 – Lots of juice today – I was just in the wrong end of the hall yesterday… 🙂

I am in Amsterdam – at the Picnic07 conference. It is great and it has been a good first day.

Some of my favourites were:

Blaise Aguera y Arcas who talked about Photosynth (the link is for a video at Channel9) – a new way of presenting photos – awesome and easy looking at the same time (bought by Microsoft and not available yet).

And then I was amazed by Jonathan Harris who is behind We feel fine and Universe. Both projects are about documenting what we are doing on the net in new ways. Jonathan Harris also shared information on a new project about documentation of a whalehunt, which will be out in a couple of months.

I also really enjoyed David Silverman who gave us a lot of outtakes from The Simpsons – and David Weinberger who was mainly adressing the new order (as in new way of organizing stuff) on the web – but there will be much more about that later.

And BTW the juice is power – not orange 🙂 I will not be blogging live tomorrow either – there are to few outtakes in the venue – and my old Dell Latitude can not handle more than an hour or two with no juice.

My global collegue and friend Rebecca Blood who is the author of “The weblog handbook” does a series of interviews with bloggers on blogging – and on that account I have been faced with some very good questions on blogs and corporate blogging for the last couple of weeks.